For the Dignity of Vets and the Love of Country

Charlie Nguyen dozed in the back seat of the cramped bus when it made its next, sudden stop: his fifth funeral of the morning.

A member of the volunteer Memorial Honor Detail at Riverside National Cemetery, Nguyen shrugged off the fatigue from his overnight shift at work to serve in uniform at 10 funerals Thursday at the busiest military burial ground in the nation.

“The bottom line is that we would like to serve,” Mark Nguyen, 53, a medical engineer from Huntington Beach, said of his Vietnamese American compatriots. “We’re proud to serve.”

With about 30 veterans laid to rest in Riverside National Cemetery each day, these veteran and civilian volunteers are in constant demand for a task that will only grow in coming years with the deaths of World War II vets, said Dean Moline, the cemetery’s assistant director.

Roughly 40 volunteer groups make up the cemetery’s Memorial Honor Detail and have presented flags or played taps at about 16,000 services since 1996, Moline said.

Some are working people taking vacation days to stand at attention in the drizzle; many others are retired, shuffling slowly, bearing rifles and tightly folded flags. But the volunteer honor guard shows up, shoes and buttons shining, because “there’s a desperate need,” said Lt. Gen. Allen A. Baumann of the United States Volunteers-Joint Services Command, based in Los Angeles.

“These people served, and they were promised military honors -- and they deserve military honors,” said Jack Campbell, 81, a World War II Army Air Corps aircraft gunner who presents grieving families with their flags and grasps their hands in gratitude.

Not every family requests the full ritual of a military funeral; at one service Thursday, grieving relatives asked the honor guard to forgo the deafening rifle salute. But the vast majority wish for such a send-off.

Without the solemn-faced lines of uniformed men and women flanking a flag-draped casket, the ceremony “just is flat,” said Vi Sparks, 83, who was touching up her late husband Glenn’s grave with yellow mums and a fresh flag.

“It honors the men and women that are here,” said the Hemet retiree, whose husband and son served in the Army for decades. Vets “need that, and the family that’s left” needs it too, Sparks said.

That’s where Linda Sykes comes in. The 46-year-old office manager plays hooky from work every month to train fellow volunteers in riflery, flag folding and following the innumerable regulations that each formal observance must follow.

On Thursday, many of her compatriots were elderly Vietnamese-military veterans from Westminster and other communities, showing loyalty to their adopted country. The group’s schedule was jammed Thursday because of today’s Veterans Day observance, when burials are suspended in deference to the expected crowd of several thousand.

Sometimes stealing away from her job at a Hemet high school is tough, but Sykes is comfortable with sacrifice: Her husband and two of her three sons are retired, active or reserve Marines, and one son just returned from Iraq.

“It’s love of country,” Sykes explains of her six years walking the gently sloping sidewalks of Riverside National Cemetery in measured, sober steps.

Services were held for more than 8,000 veterans last year in the cemetery’s 900-plus acres of green meadow laced with duck ponds and trees. And with 160,900 total gravesites already, Riverside could well surpass Arlington National Cemetery’s 300,000-plus plots in coming decades, Moline said.

Right now, the National Cemetery Administration is undertaking its largest expansion since the Civil War, said agency spokesman Mike Nacincik. That means that as 1,800 U.S. veterans die each day, Sykes and company’s dedication has become essential.

But Campbell, the 81-year-old former gunner, takes a philosophical approach to service in the honor guard:

“I’m a World War II vet,” said Campbell, who still works as an accountant at a San Juan Capistrano school. “Tomorrow it might be me.”